WORLD’s FASTEST GROWING MEDICINE

John – do you have a citation for homeopathy being the world’s fastest-growing medicine? I’d love to use it but need the source. Karen Wehrstein

Dear Karen,

Yes, the Indian Chamber of Commerce estimates that homeopathy is growing at 30% a year.

The Hindustani Times reports that according to the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India (ASSOCHAM), the Indian homeopathy treatment market is likely to grow 30% annually and reach a size of Rs. 4,600 crore (46 billion) as the number of users is growing fast within and outside the country.

The global homeopathy market is estimated at Rs. 26,300 crore with France being the largest contributor, according to the study by ASSOCHAM. Last year, the domestic homeopathy market size was about Rs. 2,758 crore.

A crore is a unit in the Indian numbering system equal to ten million (10,000,000.) They report that the global growth of homeopathy is approximately 25%.

In dollars the world homoeopathy market according to ASSOCHAM is $5.35 billion. It is not known if this includes services, is for the sale of remedies items alone, or includes ancillary products. But if we multiply $5.35 billion by 1.25% annually, without adjustment for inflation, we get a 1.1 trillion dollar global market by 2035, which means it will have surpassed current allopathic medicine.

According to a US study conducted in 2005 by Marketresearch.com, $230 million were made in sales of homeopathic products in 2005. Although it is difficult to dig up concrete stats on the universal sales of natural and homeopathic related products, more recent data from the National Center for Homeopathy (U.S.) shows sales also increasing by as much as 20-30% in 2006, as compared to the year before, concordant with Indian figures.

25 – 30% ANNUAL GROWTH WORLDWIDE

These are only projected monetary figures, and homeopathy is renowned as an inexpensive curative medicine, not for how much money it makes, but for how much it can save through its infinitesimal posology, a cost that is as infinitesimally small compared to allopathy in the treatment of serious diseases, like cancer, malaria and AIDS.

When I first began exploring the literature on pre-clinical testing in 2000 I discovered it to be virtually unknown by homeopaths. After receiving a stack of pre-clinical studies from the Deutches Homeopathic Union and discovering Stephenson’s pre-clincal bibliography of the 20th century, I assembled a list of 52 of them and was the first to post such data on the Internet in 2000 on marius.net, listed as the first entry of The John Benneth Journal as “Proof for Homeopathy.”

Google now reports 5.4 million “results” when “homeopathy” is entered into their search engine. PUBMED, the US government archives online, lists over 4400 articles referencing homeopathy on its website.

The National Center for Homeopathy in March of 2011 started a grass roots movement to encourage users of homeopathy to make Youtube videos talking about successes in using homeopathy, called “Homeopathy Works for Me.” As of this writing there were over a hundred videos on Youtube with the “homeopathy works for me” tag that pop up under that search command on the Youtube website. It is only a fraction of the total videos about homeopathy on Youtube. Search results on the keyword “homeopathy” on Youtube brings 5,570 video results.

If Einstein is to be believed when he said “Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds” then the strident, endless opposition to homeopathy alone is enough classify it as a raging success. Over two centuries the opposition comes on strong as the party of science, but it always turns into nothing but the party of empty theory and denial of evidence, that “anything so highly diluted cannot work, so therefore the evidence must not be scientifically based.”

Hahnemann met the same complaints, which began as . . or quickly devolved into . . nothing more than insults and name calling. His suggestion to critics was that if they truly wanted to debunk it, then test it following prescribed use. It was because of this steely challenge that the powder keg was ignited and the homeopathic boom felt around the world, to make it what it is today, a leader in medicine, threatening to become the primary medical paradigm.

GROWTH IN THE MATERIAL SCIENCES

Traditionally it has been the putative belief that there is no plausible mechanism of action for the homeopathic remedy. This changed in 2007 when Professor Rustum Roy, the renowned godfather of the material sciences at Pennsylvania State University led a team of scientists to review the literature and conduct a series of experiments to examine the plausibility that water could create specific biological effects.

Roy states, “This paper . . does definitively demolish the objection against homeopathy, when such is based on the wholly incorrect claim that since there is no difference in composition between a remedy and the pure water used, there can be no differences at all between them. We show the untenability of this claim against the central paradigm of materials science that it is structure (not composition) that (largely) controls properties, and structures can easily be changed in inorganic phases without any change of composition. The burden of proof on critics of homeopathy is to establish that the structure of the processed remedy is not different from the original solvent.”

“The principal conclusions of this paper concern only the plausibility of the biological action of ultradiluted water remedies, they are based on some very old (e.g. homeopathy) and some very new (e.g. metallic and nanobubble colloids) observations which have been rejected on invalid grounds or due to ignorance of the materials research literature and its theoretical basis.”

The strident critics of homeopathy were still unmoved that more of their vaunted ranks were defecting. The idea that water could retain a “memory” like magnetic recording tape still seemed absurd. But the argument against homeopathy shook it to its core from two sources.

Testing by a Nobel laureate (Montagnier) validated the first serious challenge to the notion that water can’t carry the unique signal of solutes that have recently passed through it (Benveniste), as is implicated in highly diluted homeopathic remedies.

The second blow came from the man Prof. Roy referred to as the “guru off water,” Professor Martin Chaplin of London South Bank University.

IS IT REAL, OR IS IT . . WATER?

In a June 201o article about homeopathy and the memory of water, Prof. Chaplin wrote, “Water does store and transmit information, concerning solutes, by means of its hydrogen-bonded network.”Memory of Water (See also Chaplin’s other articles on an relevent to homeopathy, “Water Structure and Science,” and “Homeopathy.”)

SCIENCE: WATER CAN BE MAGNETICALLY IMPRINTED AND ERASED

The master had spoken. That was all that needed to be said. The argument against the memory of water was dead.

In the words of Nobelist Brian Josephson [quoted in a Feb. lecture] “the idea that water can have a memory can easily be disposed of by a number of easily understood invalid arguments.”

Like magnetic recording tape, water can store and transmit complex information magnetically, and just like audio recording tape, it can be erased, something that was known by homeopaths but not specifically determined by the material sciences until nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) experiments by a French team led by Dr. Rolland Conte using nuclear magnetic resonance equipment and advanced statistics showed that, just like recording tape, magnetic fields, UV, heat and cold could alter, damage and erase imprints on water . . the amnesia of water.

GROWTH IN EPIDEMIOLOGY

Two hundred and ten years have passed since Hahnemann administered the first doses of of a high dilute of Belladonna during the 1801 Scarlet Fever epidemic in Königslutter and stunned his colleagues when it turned out he appeared to be handing out nothing more than little sugar pills. Since then to the present day homeopathy has repeatedly outperformed standard immunizations 10 to 1 or more in epidemics of Poliomyelitis; Chicken-pox; all types of Hepatitis, Japanese Encephalitis, Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib); Measles; Pneumococcal disease; Cholera; Smallpox; Typhoid; Typhus; Whooping cough; Rubella (German measles); Mumps; Diphtheria; Malaria; Yellow Fever; AIDS, Dysentery and has been reported to be effective in curing mysterious and unnamed and incurable diseases such as rabies! (Andre Seine).

HOMEOPATHY: AS GOOD AS VACCINES

Dr. Isaac Golden at Melbourne’s Swinburne University conducted the largest study undertaken anywhere in the world on the long-term health effects of homeopathic protection. It was completed in 2004. His research analyzed 2,304 responses from 1,159 children. Each response covered one year of a child’s life. The study showed homeopathy equalled standardized, conventional inoculations in preventing epidemic childhood diseases, and were found to be effective in 90.4% of all cases treated!

In the Iowa smallpox epidemic of 1902, homeopathic prophylaxis was given to 2,806 patients successfully!

In a 1974 epidemic of meningococcal meningitis in Brazil, 18,640 children were given a preventative homeopathic remedy. Only 4 cases of meningitis occurred in these children!

During the 1957 Poliomyelitis epidemic in Buenos Aires, homeopaths and medical doctors distributed homeopathic Lathyrus sativus to over 40,000 people! Defying exposure, not oneof them developed Polio during the epidemic!

Homeopathy now addresses diseases such as cancer, diabetes, veterinary, and phytopathological (plant) diseases. There is now a new field of homeopathy called agrohomeopathy, led by Dutch homeopath Vaikunthanath das Kaviraj.

There are now homeopathic veterinarians! In September 2011 it was announced that the European Parliament’s Agriculture Committee (AGRI) would vote on a draft budget of 2 million Euros ($2.7 million dollars or £1.7 million pounds) for research on the use of homeopathy in farm animals!

The World Health Organization at one point listed homeopathy as the second most used medical modality in the world today, but according to Kaviraj, who claims to have seen the report, it was quickly pulled from the Internet. The WHO report listed homeopathy second only to traditional Chinese medicine in global popularity. Third was herbal medicine, fourth was Western standardized medicine.

Can it truthfully be said that acupuncture, chiropractic or Chinese herbs . . or even standardized, Western allopathic medicine, can be as effective as homeopathic in epidemics, without the numbers casting doubt on the claimant?

There is one final argument I would like to present here for the claim that homeopathy is the fastest growing medicine in the world today (this is my killshot) and that is that compared to other systems of medicine . . allopathy, acupuncture, Yoga, herbal, Qi Gong, manipulation, massage . . at its inception, all these other systems of treatment were thousands of years old. (A case could be made for chiropractic being newer, but I would counter by saying that it was a development of what was already self evident, many chiropractic doctors practice homeopathy, chiropractic has no ancillary pharmacy for consumers, nor revolutionary physics just now being understood)

If this is not explosive growth, then I ask you, how does anyone explain its acceptance by the very same people who were formerly thought to denounce it as delusion? I have lectured at the world’s most renowned laboratory to Nobel laureates on the physico-chemical properties of homeopathy, as reported by top material scientists. Why am I, a mere “enthusiast,” (as they have called me) being entertained at the world’s oldest and most prestigious institution of science, the Cavendish Laboratory, by Prof. Josephson, if there wasn’t a desire to know more about homeopathy in the top echelons of science?

Josephson admits he has colleagues, one a physicist, who use homeopathy. But what could be more jaw dropping to scientists to learn that the first Nobel prize was unwittingly awarded for homeopathy!?

The use of similitude, “like cures like,” to which homeopathy refers, is the basis for all vaccinations. The only difference is in posology, i.e. how to adminster the dose. This may be difficult to accept for some, but antagonists of the craft must admit it is stifling true. Behring, regarded by some as the father of modern medicine said,

“In spite of all scientific speculations and experiments regarding smallpox vaccination, Jenner’s discovery remained an erratic blocking medicine, till the biochemically thinking Pasteur, devoid of all medical classroom knowledge, traced the origin of this therapeutic block to a principle which cannot better be characterized than by Hahnemann’s word: homeopathic. Indeed, what else causes the epidemiological immunity in sheep, vaccinated against anthrax than the influence previously exerted by a virus, similar in character to that of the fatal anthrax virus? And by what technical term could we more appropriately speak of this influence, exerted by a similar virus than by Hahnemann’s word ‘homeopathy’? I am touching here upon a subject anathematized till very recently by medical penalty: but if I am to present these problems in historical illumination, dogmatic imprecations must not deter me.”

Yet without such validation as it now has in the material sciences, it has been in constant use by medical doctors for 200 years. The FDCA was sponsored by a homeopath. It outperformed allopathy 10 to one during the 1918 Flu pandemic. The Cubans recently administered 4.5 million doses of it to stop a leptospirosis epidemic, [PDF] driving crackpot debunkers crazy with doubt, resulting in virtual eradication of the disease, saving Cuba millions of dollars!

Some have made careers fighting it, and yet all their effort seem to do is throw gasoline on its fire.

As the physical properties and mechanism of the homeopathic remedies become understood, how can it not supercharge this industry? If 25%-30% annual growth is not explosive growth, then what is?

So not only is it the fastest growing medicine in the world today, it is the most modern, and as will be seen, the most scientific, in that it is, for the most part, discovered and developed through direct observation and personal experience by both laymen and professionals alike.

Most people, including current practicing homeopaths, don’t know how powerful homeopathy can be when properly executed.

In the 20th century it has ironically been relegated to the treatment of self limiting diseases [all disease is self limiting homeopathically]. But there has been a remarkable change in this when it was announced in an international journal of oncology that in-vivo experiments at the nation’s top cancer clinic have revealed that high dilutes, as used in homeopathy, can kill cancer cells, and subsequently was used clinically to cure cancer in-vivo.

From its very inception, homeopathy has had the same abusive, non-sensical opposition by the puppets of allopathy as it has now. In other words, whereas it defies logic and only the evidence advocates it, it has grown by leaps and bounds, while the argument against it remains the same as it was 200 years, amounting to nothing more than hand waving, name calling and curses.

Anyone with any intelligence can see it for what it is. All it takes to propel this great adventure ahead is work of the kind found on websites like

Thanks Karen for asking this question this is very helpful as I was looking for that exact citation for a documentary I’m working on.
John would you have a more exact citation – which edition, date etc of the Hindustani times printed this? Do you know which study by Marketresearch.com had those findings I can’t find a 2005 study by them (only an Indian pharmaceutical one)

And Kavi did you really see this report – because I quoted that statistic in my fundraising film but was attacked by someone as absolutely impossible – and they were right I didn’t have adequate citations for that quote.

This is great stuff! As a practitioner I can often be found struggling with how to deal with the skeptics and vast political interests against homeopathy. A dose of this blog however gives me a tangible boost to keep the information, promotion & practice of homeopathy flowing…